The Gold of Glastonbury
One silver morning I walked into a small grey town of stone, like twenty
other grey western towns, which happened to be called Glastonbury;
and saw the magic thorn of near two thousand years growing in the open
air as casually as any bush in my garden.
In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is more
important than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of
the strange old tale of St. Joseph and the Thorn than that it dwarfs
St. Dunstan. Standing among the actual stones and shrubs one thinks
of the first century and not of the tenth; one's mind goes back beyond
the Saxons and beyond the greatest statesman of the Dark Ages. The tale
that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend.
But it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend
as many modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing
is quite comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler
went to Chicago, or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole.
We think of Palestine as little, localized and very private,
of Christ's followers as poor folk, astricti globis, rooted to their
towns or trades; and we think of vast routes of travel and constant
world-communications as things of recent and scientific origin.
But this is wrong; at least, the last part of it is. It is
part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists tell
when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.
Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling
cosmopolitan civilization. Long sea-voyages were not so quick,
but were quite as incessant as to-day; and though in the nature
of things Christ had not many rich followers, it is not unnatural
to suppose that He had some. And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily
have been a Roman citizen with a yacht that could visit Britain.
The same fallacy is employed with the same partisan motive in the case
of the Gospel of St. John; which critics say could not have been
written by one of the first few Christians because of its Greek
transcendentalism and its Platonic tone. I am no judge of the philology,
but every human being is a divinely appointed judge of the philosophy:
and the Platonic tone seems to me to prove nothing at all.
Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians; it was
an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts
of people of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel:
suppose some great prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa.
The prophet himself might be a simple or unlettered man.
But no one who knows the modern world would be surprised if one
of his closest followers were a Professor from Heidelberg or an
M.A. from Oxford.
All this is not urged here with any notion of proving that the tale
of the thorn is not a myth; as I have said, it probably is a myth.
It is urged with the much more important object of pointing
out the proper attitude towards such myths.. The proper attitude
is one of doubt and hope and of a kind of light mystery.
The tale is certainly not impossible; as it is certainly not certain.
And through all the ages since the Roman Empire men have fed their
healthy fancies and their historical imagination upon the very twilight
condition of such tales. But to-day real agnosticism has declined
along with real theology. People cannot leave a creed alone;
though it is the essence of a creed to be clear. But neither can they
leave a legend alone; though it is the essence of a legend to be vague.
That sane half scepticism which was found in all rustics,
in all ghost tales and fairy tales, seems to be a lost secret.
Modern people must make scientifically certain that St. Joseph did
or did not go to Glastonbury, despite the fact that it is now quite
impossible to find out; and that it does not, in a religious sense,
very much matter. But it is essential to feel that he may have
gone to Glastonbury: all songs, arts, and dedications branching
and blossoming like the thorn, are rooted in some such sacred doubt.
Taken thus, not heavily like a problem but lightly like an old tale,
the thing does lead one along the road of very strange realities,
and the thorn is found growing in the heart of a very secret maze
of the soul. Something is really present in the place; some closer
contact with the thing which covers Europe but is still a secret.
Somehow the grey town and the green bush touch across the world
the strange small country of the garden and the grave; there is verily
some communion between the thorn tree and the crown of thorns.
A man never knows what tiny thing will startle him to such ancestral
and impersonal tears. Piles of superb masonry will often pass like a
common panorama; and on this grey and silver morning the ruined towers
of the cathedral stood about me somewhat vaguely like grey clouds.
But down in a hollow where the local antiquaries are making
a fruitful excavation, a magnificent old ruffian with a pickaxe
(whom I believe to have been St. Joseph of Arimathea) showed me
a fragment of the old vaulted roof which he had found in the earth;
and on the whitish grey stone there was just a faint brush of gold.
There seemed a piercing and swordlike pathos, an unexpected
fragrance of all forgotten or desecrated things, in the bare
survival of that poor little pigment upon the imperishable rock.
To the strong shapes of the Roman and the Gothic I had grown accustomed;
but that weak touch of colour was at once tawdry and tender,
like some popular keepsake. Then I knew that all my fathers were
men like me; for the columns and arches were grave, and told of
the gravity of the builders; but here was one touch of their gaiety.
I almost expected it to fade from the stone as I stared.
It was as if men had been able to preserve a fragment of a sunset.
And then I remembered how the artistic critics have always praised
the grave tints and the grim shadows of the crumbling cloisters and
abbey towers, and how they themselves often dress up like Gothic ruins
in the sombre tones of dim grey walls or dark green ivy. I remembered
how they hated almost all primary things, but especially primary colours.
I knew they were appreciating much more delicately and truly than I
the sublime skeleton and the mighty fungoids of the dead Glastonbury.
But I stood for an instant alive in the living Glastonbury,
gay with gold and coloured like the toy-book of a child.
